Masonry Construction

This book contains a comprehensive guide to the latest developments in building and bridge construction. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the use of advanced materials such as fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites and the incorporation of smart technologies into design and construction of buildings and bridges.

This book provides an overview to those most important modern and traditional methods of masonry analysis that are able to capture the discrete internal built-up of masonry structures. Such methods are available in a wide variety today – from computational packages based on classical graphical statics techniques through discrete element methods or the most sophisticated no-tension semi-continuum models – , and this book reviews their theoretical foundations, as well as their advantages and preferable fields of application, also calling the attention on their limitations so that the reader could build up a critical view of the choices they have when attacking a masonry mechanics problem. The book gives a basis for the readers to become able to develop their own methods, inspired either by classical graphical statics, or by any modern technique they find promising.